Title

Author

Date of Award

5-2017

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Advisor

Prof Franz Kurfess

Abstract

The use of gesture based interaction with devices has been a significant area of research in the field of computer science since many years. The main idea of these kind of interactions is to ease the user experience by providing high degree of freedom and provide more interactive way of communication with the technology in a natural way. The significant areas of applications of gesture recognition are in video gaming, human computer interaction, virtual reality, smart home appliances, medical systems, robotics and several others. With the availability of the devices such as Kinect, Leap Motion and Intel RealSense cameras accessing the depth as well as color information has become available to the public with affordable costs.

The Intel RealSense camera is a USB powered controller that can be supported with few hardware requirements such as Windows 8 and above. This is one such camera that can be used to track the human body information similar to the Kinect and Leap Motion. It was designed specifically to provide more minute information about the different parts of the human body such as face, hand etc. This camera was designed to give users more natural and intuitive interactions with the smart devices by providing some features such as creating 3D avatars, high quality 3D prints, high-quality graphic gaming visuals, virtual reality and others.

The main aim of this study is to try to analyze hand tracking information and build a training model in order to decide if this camera is suitable for sign language. In this study, we have extracted the joint information of 22 joint labels per single hand .We trained the model to identify the Indian Sign Language(ISL) numbers from 0-9. Through this study we analyzed that multi-class SVM model showed higher accuracy of 93.5% when compared to the decision tree and KNN models.